The Old Man of the Stars

by John Burke

  He said: “There’s Clifford. He must have been in the observatory.”

  A tall young man in a smooth, one-piece mechanic’s plasticoat came hurrying towards them. He looked from Matthew to the girl in surprise.

  “Hello, sir. I didn’t know you knew Alida.”

  “We’ve only just met. I didn’t realise you had won a volunteer for us.”

  Clifford gasped. “I’d no idea....”

  “Well, let’s leave it for the time being, anyway. We’re nowhere near launching day yet, I fancy.”

  Clifford grimaced. “Men dropping off again. They don’t see the point of working hard. The only comment I’ve heard in favour of carrying on”—he grinned—“was to the effect that it would be worth getting the job finished so that they could see the back of you, and then everyone would be able to live in peace.”

  Matthew smiled ruefully.

  The two men took Alida up into the interior of the ship. The gangways and floors were all tilted to one side at present, but it was still possible to examine the control panels, unused for so long, and appraise the furnishings and fittings. Nothing had decayed: here on Elysium the ship had been preserved, free from corrosion and rot.

  Yet that was not enough. As Matthew had long ago explained to Clifford and as he now explained to Alida, you could not leave a machine such as this ship unused for a couple of hundred years and expect it to work again as soon as you pressed a button. Circuits had to be checked, and innumerable mechanical adjustments made. Plates had buckled slightly, particularly around the exhausts, as a result of the mere weight of the ship remaining in the same position for so long. There were fuel problems, too: it was necessary to adapt the local supplies and to experiment with new combinations. The rocket tubes would need to be altered to cope with different conditions.

  “Even so, it wouldn’t be a difficult job,” said Matthew, “if only we got some co-operation.”

  Alida did not reply. It was evident that she had not yet made up her mind whether to persist in regarding the whole venture as a pointless folly or whether to admit that, in spite of everything, her imagination was somehow fired.

  As she climbed slowly and awkwardly up the slanting corridor to the main lounge, the two men looked out of an open port at the welders below. Clifford said:

  “I was making a few more checks on that incoming planet just before you arrived.”

  “Oh, yes. Anything startling?”

  “No It won’t come very close. As far as my calculations go, I should say that it comes regularly into this area—about once in three hundred years, roughly. One of the travellers. That’s assuming it has a fixed orbit, of course: it may be one of the rogues.”

  “In which case it might hit us.”

  “I don’t think so. It won’t even give us any bad weather, as far as I can tell.”

  “Any reports from any of the other towns?”

  Clifford’s lip curled. “Nobody else seems interested. Sometimes I can’t even make radio contact with them—they don’t answer calls, or else they leave their sets switched off altogether.”

  Matthew glanced at him with affection. He liked this boy. Clifford was one of the few speculative types left in this self-satisfied world. He was a scientist and an adventurer of the mind: he wanted to know why things happened; he wanted to make things work. He was driven on by a splendid discontent. In the old days, back on Earth, he would have been the sort of boy who at the age of three or four years takes a watch to pieces, and puts it back together again.

  Suddenly Clifford leaned forward and muttered:

  “Hello, what’s the fuss?”

  A man had run in from the direction of the observatory and was looking about him. Clifford shouted and waved.

  The man below looked up and shouted.

  “Can’t hear a word,” said Clifford. “Better go down. Bellhouse looks worked-up about something.”

  He slid expertly down the slope, caught the edge of the airlock door, and lowered himself down the flimsy ladder to the ground. He and Bellhouse talked for a moment, and then they were waving Matthew down. Matthew fetched Alida and helped her back to ground level. He found Clifford already fuming with impatience.

  “A message from Martinstown,” he said at once, as soon as Matthew had reached him. “Incredible. They’ve been attacked.”

  “Attacked? By whom?”

  “Three spaceships.”

  Spaceships.... Matthew’s first reaction was one of incredulous joy. Spaceships, messengers from home or at least from some civilisation in contact with Earth! Then the hope faded. It was too much to expect. And, as the meaning of what Clifford had said sank in, he demanded:

  “But what reason was there for attacking Martinstown? Nobody on this planet would do it. Besides, we haven’t got three spaceships anywhere here. They’re not things you can construct in secret. And who’d want to?”

  “Nevertheless,” said Clifford, “they reported a devastating attack on the town—a great blaze spreading from the outskirts, and the ships coming back for another attempt—and then they went dead. Not a sound. Cut off completely.”

  “I just don’t understand. No race that I’ve ever known came out of the skies and starting destroying towns and people for no reason whatever. Was there no attempt to establish normal contact?”

  “If there was,” said Clifford grimly, “the operator didn’t tell me. He said the ships circled low over the town for a minute or two; and of course everyone came out to have a look; and then the firing started.”

  They looked at one another, all possessed by the same thought at once.

  Alida said: “We must tell our own people. At once.”

  Bellhouse went racing back to the observatory. The others followed, crossing the springy turf to the knoll on which the smaller building stood.

  Clifford said, taking Alida’s arm as they hurried up the steps: “Do you think they’ll make for our own town now—or are the others to suffer first? We must send out a general alarm.”

  “If you can make anybody listen,” said Matthew savagely. “If they haven’t got their receivers switched off!”

  They found Bellhouse already sending out his signal.

  “No reply from our own administration Centre,” he snapped. “They’ve probably got their chairs drawn up to the window so they can admire the view—and the set switched off so that they’re not disturbed by the demands of our modern mechanised civilisation.”

  He flicked another wavelength into operation, and got an immediate reply.

  “Enemy spaceships attacked Martinstown,” he said without delay.

  There was a squawk of disbelief from the receiver.

  “Martinstown has been blotted out,” he shouted. “This is no joke. It’s true. Best thing, maybe, is to get your people out into the woods and fields. Lie low until we see whether the ships are going to tackle any of the rest of us.”

  He cut off a protest in mid-sentence, and tried to make contact with the most remote of the Elysian towns. Again there was no reply. That could mean anything: it could mean that the set had been switched off, or it could mean that the town had already been destroyed.

  “Perhaps it’s going up in smoke this very minute,” said Matthew. “But damn it, what’s the point—?”

  “They’re coming! Here they come!”

  The cry reached them faintly from below.

  They swung round and looked up through the glass dome, over towards the hills that concealed the destruction of Martinstown.

  There in the sky, speeding in this direction, were three slivers of brightness, three gleaming ships racing towards their own town.

  “Outside!” snapped Clifford decisively. “Safer out there until we know what’s happening. Down to the edge of the woods. You three get moving, I’ll warn the others.”

  The men from the main construction hall were emerging into the open. Clifford waved them towards the shelter of the woods, then he himself stood for a moment at the foot of the slope, stari
ng up as the ships came dropping lower and lower.

  “Clifford!” It was Alida, despairingly calling him.

  He waved reassuringly and moved slowly into cover, still watching with awed fascination as the ships streaked overhead, ignoring the two isolated buildings on the edge of the wood and heading straight for the town itself.

  In less than ten seconds there was an explosion that shook the ground and sent a ravaging wind through the trees. Flame stood up in the distance, growing and bending, then growing again, like some lurching giant trying to stand upright.

  Matthew said: “It’s insane. So senseless.... Wanton destruction. What race can so lust for destruction that it attacks without provocation like this? Am I going mad?”

  “If you are,” said Clifford, “we all are.”

  Again there was a shudder through the earth. Beyond the trees, interlaced with the pattern of trunks and branches, they saw the great glow of their dying town.

  Then they heard voices. A group of men and women, dragging and carrying children, forced their way through the undergrowth, sobbing and shouting with fear.

  Alida moved towards them to offer help. Clifford waved to them to be careful and not to emerge from the wood yet.

  Bellhouse began to sob with terrifying quietness. He said through his teeth: “My wife was in there. And my mother and father.”

  The flames began to attack the fringe of the woods.

  Matthew said: “We won’t be able to stay in here for long, once that fire gets started. It’s to be hoped those ships have gone. If they’re going to come back and destroy the observatory and the sheds, they’d better hurry up about it.”

  He stared down at the building that housed the space ship. If that went, all hope went with it. He was utterly impotent: he and this group of people with him could do nothing to check this murderous assault from the heavens.

  Clifford said: “If they do come back....” He paused, and glanced questioningly at Matthew. “The disruptors—the guns on our ship—they work from the same power pile. It’s still running on test. They ought to work.”

  Matthew said huskily: “Anything might go wrong. They haven’t been checked over.”

  “Nothing much worse can happen than what’s going to happen anyway,” said Clifford. He took a pace forward, down the hill. “Are you coming?”

  “Of course I’m coming.”

  Matthew, Clifford, and Bellhouse were running down to the entrance. They were breathless by the time they reached the control cabin, slipping and sliding along the tilted floor. Below, one of the men who had followed them threw a switch, and the great roof rolled back. Now the ship lay on its side beneath the sky to which it belonged. And inside the ship the three men watched and waited, each with fingers poised above the starboard disruptor controls.

  “We shall probably go up along with the ship,” said Bellhouse with a half-hysterical laugh.

  Dazzling across the sky game the three destroyers, the three vicious ships from space. Their noses turned down towards the buildings that waited for there.

  Clifford found time to say, as though it were a theory worth discussing at this very moment: “Maybe they come from that planet that’s swum into view recently. Seems probable.”

  Matthew said: “Could be.” And then the predictor control flickered its warning, the disruptor quivered gently and seemed to reach out as though plucked from its mountings by the approaching ships. Matthew’s finger stabbed down.

  There was a gout of savage, radiant force that scorched away part of the corner of the roof. But at the same time two stabbing fingers leaped out from the two companion disruptors, and caught in their mingled, blinding beam was one of the attacking ships.

  It was knocked upwards as though punched by a mighty hand. The nose dissolved, molten metal falling on the ground below; and the spinning wreckage of what had once been a spaceship made a great spinning arc and came to earth out on the grassy plain below the hills.

  “Next one!” shouted Matthews exultantly.

  There was a delay. They waited for the other two ships to come back.

  Then, faintly, they heard the mechanic calling them from below. Clifford opened the nearest port and leaned out.

  “They’ve gone!” came the jubilant message.

  “They’ll only be turning to come back and have another go,” warned Matthew.

  “No. He says they’ve gone well beyond the hills—angled upwards.”

  “Off for reinforcements?”

  “We can relax for a little while, anyhow.”

  Bellhouse stayed in the cabin in case of a sudden emergency. Matthew and Clifford lowered themselves to the ground and went out into the air, reeking with smoke that blew over from the stricken town. The woods were burning slowly but steadily.

  The handful of survivors, helped down by the men who had been working here, came down to the shelter of the observatory.

  Matthew said: “I think you’re right, and those murderers did come from that new planet. Now they’re going back to report. After all, from up there this ship of ours must look pretty menacing. It’s four times as big as their things, and they couldn’t know that it wasn’t capable of leaving the ground. A couple of destroyers might be able to knock hell out of a battleship, but it’s safer to go and get the rest of the fleet.”

  “I wonder how long that will take?”

  “Hours, perhaps. Or maybe a day or two. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back tonight, ready to finish us off.”

  They looked out speculatively across the plain to the hills. It was Clifford who said:

  “I’d like to go and have a look at that wreckage.”

  “What? Good heavens, yes.”

  “There might be somebody—something—still alive. We oughtn’t to dismiss that possibility.”

  “After seeing that ship come down,” said Matthew vindictively, “I am prepared to dismiss the possibility of anybody inside it being alive. But I’d like to have a look at what’s left.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Clifford, “we must investigate—if we’re still alive. I think we need to be very much on the alert tonight.”

  * * * *

  But the ships did not return that night. And in the morning it began to rain—not gently and refreshingly as it usually did on Elysium, but with a ferocity that literally beat the breath out of anybody not under cover. A wind came up—a wind such as had never been known on this planet before. Then lightning blazed along the horizon, heralding a furious electrical storm that lasted for five days.

  It was futile to try to contact the other towns, to find if they still existed. There was nothing but a wild roaring in the receiver. Light played about the observatory dome, and the hall in which the spaceship lay resounded to the persistent drumming of the rain.

  “There used to be a lot of arguments back on Earth,” Matthew reminisced, “about the effects of man’s doings. There were tales told of the really ancient days when cannons were fired at clouds to bring rain down. And then bad weather was blamed on atom bombs and so on. It may or may not have been true on Earth, but it certainly looks as though the weapons we—or maybe those others—used here have shaken up the Elysian atmosphere.”

  Clifford said: “It’s saved us from an immediate attack, anyway. I don’t believe any ship would try any nonsense under these conditions.”

  “We’ll just have to wait and see what happens when the storm clears.”

  At the end of the fifth day there were signs that stability was returning. The rain stopped and the electric oppressiveness of the atmosphere relaxed its grip on the men and women who had been sheltering in the construction hall. The skies cleared. Clifford did not waste any time. He went to the observatory, and returned within fifteen minutes, pursing his lips over a sheet of scribbled calculations.

  “That planet has moved some distance away by now,” he said. “My guess is that we won’t see any more of those ships. There was a sharp intersection of our two orbits, but we’re moving away from one a
nother pretty fast, and I should imagine that the distance is too great for them to make another sortie like that—unless, of course, they’re really anxious to make a lot of trouble.”

  “I still can’t begin to understand that first attack,” said Matthew. “I don’t see how we shall ever find out what it was all about.”

  Clifford said: “We can start with that wrecked ship. If they don’t come back and attack us again tonight, now that it’s clear again, we must go over to the hills tomorrow morning and examine the wreckage.”

  “Before we do that,” said Matthew sombrely, “we shall have to go and have a look at the town. There can’t be any more survivors: we should have had them over here in no time at all. But we must go and see exactly what happened to the town.”

  It was a grim duty that faced them on that following morning. They stepped in silent horror over the crumpled ruins of what had so recently been graceful buildings. Charred bodies lay on the edge of once-beautiful gardens. On the slopes below the Community Palace, the fountains still played. But the young men and women would not walk here again.

  The rain had extinguished all the fires, and at the same time had carried black rivulets across lawns and across the whiteness of fallen masonry. The town had become smeared and ugly in its death throes.

  Matthew said abruptly: “There’s nothing we can do here. Nothing but go away and leave it.”

  Clifford said: “Oughtn’t we to...? I mean....”

  He fumbled, unsure of himself, and Matthew said: “You want a handful of us to try to give decent burial to all the bits and pieces we can find? To sweep up the bits? It couldn’t be done. Don’t think I’m callous, Clifford. I’m just trying to be realistic.”

  The young man nodded.

  “While we’re being realistic,” he said, “I think we ought to face up to the fact that the few helicars we had in this town have all been destroyed. Unless we can catch an Elysian pony—which is unlikely—we shall have to walk in order to reach that wreckage. And I suggest we start now.”

  Three of them went—Matthew, Clifford, and Bellhouse. After reporting to the others and warning them to be careful if they proposed to explore the ruins for personal belongings, they set off on the long walk across the plain.